ShopMaster Alternatives: Which Shop Software Did You Actually Mean?

If you searched for ShopMaster alternatives and landed here, one of two things is true, and the first one takes a sentence to sort out.

If you meant the dropshipping tool, the one that listed products to eBay and Shopify, this is the wrong page and you should leave. This site is about software for auto repair and performance shops. Nothing below will help you.

If you meant shop management software for an auto repair shop, stay, because there is something you should know: as of 2026-09-13 we could not find a widely used auto repair shop management product called ShopMaster. What exists is a cluster of real products with names that run together in memory. You almost certainly meant one of them, and you may not be sure which.

So this page does two things. It sorts out the names, and then it puts every published price in the category into one table, because almost nobody publishes a price and the ones who do are worth knowing about before you start booking demos.

We build Third Gear Shop, one of the products in that table. You have probably never heard of us, and a price table published by a vendor who happens to be in it deserves suspicion. So: every price in it links to that vendor's own live page with the date we read it, ours included, and none of it comes from an aggregator or a forum. We have no customer logos, case studies, review scores or shop count to show you. Assume we are small and new, because we are. Take the table as the useful part and read our own row last.

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The Names That Get Confused With ShopMaster

Every product below is real and currently sells to auto shops. Each link goes to the vendor's own site, all checked 2026-09-13.

Shop Boss is the closest fit if what you half-remember is "Shop" plus a word meaning boss or master. Cloud-based, aimed at general repair, and unusually for this category it publishes its prices.

Bay-Master has "Master" right in the name and is a long-running auto shop product, now cloud-based. It describes three plans, Essentials, Traditional and High Performance, and publishes no prices for any of them.

Master Repair also carries "Master", is based in Monterey, California, and covers auto, tire, motorcycle, transmission, truck, fleet and custom shops. No published pricing, and it does advertise a free trial, which is rare here.

Shopmonkey is the most-advertised name in the category and the one most likely to be garbled into something else. Publishes pricing.

Shop-Ware is the other very common name. Publishes pricing.

Shopmanager is cloud software built for window tint, paint protection film, wraps, ceramic coating, detailing, tire and wheel, accessory install, oil and lube, and paintless dent repair. If you run that kind of shop rather than a mechanical repair shop, this is a genuinely different category and worth a look on its own terms. No published pricing.

ShopController serves auto repair, fleet, heavy duty, lube and tune, performance and restoration, mobility and powersports. No published pricing.

If none of those is the one you were thinking of, the fastest way to find it is to search the exact phrase you remember plus "auto repair", rather than "alternatives". Comparison pages, this one included, are written around the names that already rank.

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Every Published Price in the Category, In One Table

This is the part worth bookmarking. Most vendors in this market will not tell you a price without a call. Here is who does, checked on 2026-09-13, with the vendor's own page linked.

A note on what "not published" means. It is not an accusation and it does not mean the product is expensive. Plenty of good software is sold by quote. It does mean you cannot compare those products on price without booking a call with each one, which is a real cost in hours before you have learned anything.

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The Five That Publish, In Detail

Third Gear Shop

$79/month for up to 5 technicians, $149/month for unlimited technicians, month to month, no per-seat fee, no annual billing option at all. There is also a free plan, $0, capped at 3 vehicles, built for someone tracking their own project cars rather than running a shop. Paid plans start with a 14-day trial and no credit card. This is our product, so read the honest limitations section further down before you weigh it.

Tekmetric

From tekmetric.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-13. Start $199/month or $179 annually: inventory and vendor management, digital vehicle inspections, Smart Jobs, digital authorizations and invoicing. Grow $349 or $309: adds the Labor Guide, maintenance schedule, time and job clocks, and reports. Scale $439 or $409: adds two-way texting, a real-time shop dashboard, technician board and employee performance analytics. Enterprise is quoted and adds integrated payments. Add-ons are multi-shop at $70/month per shop, tire suite at $39, marketing at $345. Every tier states "Unlimited users, unlimited RO's, unlimited support, no hidden fees".

Shop Boss

From shopboss.net/pricing, checked 2026-09-13. Gold $199/month or $179 annually: calendars and appointments, inventory and vendor management, embedded payment processing, canned jobs and sublets, time and job clocks, profit per hour forecasting, multiple parts and labor guide integrations. Platinum $349 or $314: adds full labor repair guides with diagrams and procedures, a business intelligence dashboard, comprehensive digital vehicle inspections, employee performance analytics, a real-time shop dashboard, tire ordering and AI ProNotes. Premier $449 or $404: adds a responsive website with maintenance and design, monthly reporting and custom one-to-one training. Premier Plus $649 or $584: adds an online service scheduler and a marketing CRM. A CRM plus scheduler add-on is $249/month, or $224 annually.

One thing on that page that most vendors hide: Shop Boss publishes its data transfer fees. A basic transfer is $399 and a comprehensive transfer is $899. Every vendor in this category charges for migration in some form. Shop Boss is one of the few that tells you the number before the call.

Shopmonkey

From shopmonkey.io/pricing, checked 2026-09-13. Basic $239/month or $215 annually with 3 included user licenses: two-way text and email, unlimited estimates and invoices, calendar with automated reminders, 2 digital vehicle inspection templates, electronic signatures, integrated payments, parts lookup, mobile app, VIN decode and 30-plus reports. Clever $399 or $359 with 4 licenses: adds unlimited inspections, customizable workflow, purchase orders, time clock tracking, inventory management and MOTOR parts and labor. Genius $499 or $449 with 5 licenses: adds a coupons manager, automated estimate followups, a Google Reviews manager and MOTOR diagrams and procedures.

Read the user licenses carefully, because this is the one genuinely hidden cost in the published table. Additional users are "+$20 / month" each. A ten-person shop on Basic is $215 plus seven extra seats, which is $355/month, not $215. Card readers are a separate $299 per device plus $10/month.

Shop-Ware

From shop-ware.com/packages, checked 2026-09-13. Startup $279/month or $251 annually: unlimited users, AI Parts Matrix, DVX inspections, Maintenance Builder, limited two-way texting and Shop-Ware Payments. Pro $389 or $350: adds unlimited two-way texting, the MOTOR Labor Guide, a native parts catalog, OE specs, API connections, batch payments and the AutoWrite AI writing assistant. Master $499 or $449: adds a business analytics suite and gross profit tracking. Ultimate+ $999 or $899: adds a website, SEO, Google Ads enablement, call tracking, CRM and an online service scheduler. A CRM plus scheduler add-on is $249/month.

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Stop Picking by Name. Pick by the Thing You Need.

The name confusion that brought you here is a symptom of a real problem: this category has a dozen products with interchangeable marketing pages. Here is a faster way through it than reading them all.

Count your logins first. If more than five people need to be in the system, check the per-user policy before anything else. Tekmetric and Shop-Ware both state unlimited users. Shopmonkey licenses 3 to 5 seats and charges $20/month for each extra. That single line moves the real monthly cost more than any feature does.

Decide whether texting is essential. It is the feature that moves furthest between tiers. Shopmonkey has it on the $239 tier. Shop-Ware has a limited version on $279 and unlimited on $389. Tekmetric has it on $439. If you text customers all day, that one requirement can eliminate half the shortlist.

Decide whether you sell work through inspections. If yes, digital vehicle inspections with photo and video are non-negotiable and you are shopping in the $199-and-up range, full stop. If your work arrives already diagnosed, or your jobs are long builds rather than fast diagnoses, you may be paying for a workflow you will not use.

Ask every quote-only vendor for the whole number. Not the base. Base plus every module you would actually use, plus the migration fee, plus the card processing rate, in writing. Compare those totals. A $199 base with three $50 modules and a $899 migration is not a $199 product.

Ask how you get your data out. Ask it during the sales call, not two years later. Any vendor who cannot answer cleanly is telling you something.

If you have already narrowed it down, we have written longer, sourced comparisons of the three biggest names: Tekmetric vs. Third Gear Shop, the Shopmonkey comparison for small shops and what to consider before committing to Shop-Ware. If you are currently on a local Windows install, the Mitchell 1 alternative post covers what moving actually costs.

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Where Third Gear Shop Fits, And Where It Does Not

This is our product, so here are the limitations first and in full.

What it does not do. No digital vehicle inspection workflow: no templates, no per-point pass or fail, no photo markup, no video. No two-way texting of any kind. No MOTOR, Mitchell or ALLDATA labor guide. No parts-vendor ordering and no accounting integration. No marketing automation or review requests. No multi-location support. There is no bulk import of your existing customers and vehicles, which means switching costs you data entry rather than an afternoon, and no bulk export either: invoices and estimates come out as PDFs and the shop calendar publishes as a feed, but nothing hands you the whole database.

If any of those is a requirement, one of the other products on this page is your answer and we would rather you find that out here than in week two.

What it is. $79/month for up to 5 technicians, $149/month for unlimited technicians, month to month, no per-seat fee at any headcount.

At $79: a drag-and-drop job board that flags a job by itself when a part has not arrived or nobody is assigned to it, so a stalled job cannot go quiet. Jobs that stay open as long as the work takes and carry their own parts with an order status (pending, ordered, arrived, installed), their services with the date each one was performed, time logged per job and per technician, phone-camera photos, a task list and a record of what you told the customer. Estimates a customer approves or declines from a link by typing their name. Invoicing with PDF export. Parts inventory. A lookup that returns book-time estimates from the Open Labor Project, an open data source, alongside NHTSA VIN decode and recall checks and a reference panel for lug torque, fluid capacities and tire fitment, every fact labelled with its source and the date it was checked. It is not a licensed labor guide and the product says so on the screen.

At $149: your own logo and colors on invoices and estimates, card payment by link straight into your own Stripe account, expense tracking by category, reporting on revenue by technician, margin per job and profit and loss, and a private status page each customer can check for their own vehicle.

It fits two kinds of shop. The small independent one where the software bill is itself the constraint and the real need is a job board, job records and invoices that go out on time. And the performance, tuning or build shop where a job stays open for six weeks and what you actually need is one record that holds the whole build, not a fast repair-order pipeline.

Do not buy it if this is you. Six or more technicians with a parts counter and a service advisor. A close rate that depends on inspection photos going out to customers. Pricing off book times every day. A second location, or the plan for one. A parts supplier or accounting package that has to connect. Any of those and the answer is one of the other products on this page. We would rather tell you that here than take a month of your subscription first.

Two Doors, Both Free, Neither Asks for a Card

The free Garage plan is $0 with no expiry, capped at 3 vehicles, and it opens in about a minute. It shows you the job record itself, which is the core of the product: parts with an order status, services with the date each was done, tasks, photos and the reference panel. It does not show you the job board, invoices, estimates or time tracking, because those are shop features and this plan is for tracking your own cars. If the question is whether the way this thing records a job matches how you think about a job, that answers it in ten minutes at no cost.

The 14-day trial opens the shop half: job board, invoices, estimates, time tracking, parts inventory. Also no card. Of the ten products on this page, only Master Repair and this one advertise a free trial at all. Tekmetric offers a self-guided tour, which is a look rather than a run on your own jobs. Everyone else routes you to a demo booking.

Open the free plan or start the 14-day trial. No demo call, no sales sequence.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is there an auto repair software called ShopMaster?

Not one we could find in wide use as of 2026-09-13. The name most commonly returns a dropshipping tool, which is unrelated to auto repair. If you were looking for shop management software, the auto repair products with the most similar names are Shop Boss, Bay-Master, Master Repair, Shopmanager and ShopController, and the two most-advertised names in the category are Shopmonkey and Shop-Ware.

Which auto repair shop management software publishes its prices?

As of 2026-09-13, five that we checked do: Third Gear Shop at $79 and $149, Tekmetric from $199, Shop Boss from $199, Shopmonkey from $239 and Shop-Ware from $279. Mitchell 1, Bay-Master, Master Repair, Shopmanager and ShopController all route to a demo request instead.

What is the cheapest auto repair shop management software?

Of the products with published pricing, Third Gear Shop is the lowest at $79/month for up to 5 technicians, and it is ours, so weigh that accordingly and read the limitations above. The next lowest published entry prices are Tekmetric and Shop Boss at $199/month, or $179 billed annually. Anything quote-only cannot be ranked on price, which is the point of the table above.

Which of these offer a free trial?

Of the products checked on 2026-09-13, Third Gear Shop offers a 14-day trial with no credit card, plus a free plan that does not expire, and Master Repair advertises a free trial on its homepage. Tekmetric's FAQ states "Tekmetric offers free demos but not free trials", with self-guided tours instead (tekmetric.com/faq). Shopmonkey, Shop-Ware, Mitchell 1, Bay-Master, Shopmanager and ShopController route to a demo request.

Does Shop Boss charge a migration fee?

Yes, and it publishes the numbers, which most vendors do not. Its pricing page lists a basic data transfer at $399 and a comprehensive transfer at $899 (checked 2026-09-13). Ask every other vendor on your shortlist for the equivalent figure in writing before you compare monthly prices, because a migration fee can exceed the first few months of subscription.

I run a tint, PPF or detail shop rather than a mechanical repair shop. Does any of this apply?

Partly. Most products on this page are built around the mechanical repair order: diagnose, estimate, approve, repair. Shopmanager is built specifically for window tint, PPF, wraps, ceramic coating, detailing, tire and wheel, accessory install and paintless dent repair, so start there rather than adapting a general repair tool. It does not publish pricing, so ask for the full number.

Related Reading

• Shopmonkey Review: An Honest Read From a Competitor
• Tekmetric vs. Shop-Ware: A Sourced Comparison of Two Shop Management Platforms
• Tekmetric vs. Shopmonkey: The Seat Count Changes the Answer